I wanted to repost my blog from this day last year because it has gotten a little buried and because throughout the year since I posted it originally I've gotten so many great comments and stories from you. Some of you commented as sympathetic readers and others responded with your own stories of loss. Either way, I post this blog to you because this date is a big part of who I am and the music I write because May 3rd is the day my father passed away... 11 years ago today.

On my upcoming EP is a song about my dad called "Foot of the Stairs". It was a hard song to write because I always wanted to write a song about my dad, but everything was so cliche and I had trouble making the song personal. Then almost simultaneously, many years after he passed away, I got two songs about him - "Foot of the Stairs" and the rough demo I posted last year called "Specific Things". I hope to have a preview for you very soon of "Foot of the Stairs".

Until then, here is my blog from last year... With a few changes and additions. Thank you for reading and thank you for continuing to listen to my music.

s
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Eleven years ago today my whole life changed...

My father, Mike Simons, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 49 from complications after a bone marrow transplant. i was finishing my junior year in college at WVU. He had a condition called Aplastic Anemia but he was supposed to pull through. He had the best doctors at Johns Hopkins and a perfect match bone marrow donor, my aunt Eileen, his sister. In fact, the day he passed away he was technically cured but while his immune system was compromised from the transplant he contracted pneumonia.

My dad is my biggest influence on my life and my music. He wasn't a professional musician. He was actually a weatherman, and a damn good one too. Not a metereologist, mind you. He didn't know shit about the weather... but he prided himself on being able to talk off the cuff without saying 'uh...'. Although, my dad was born and raised in Philadelphia, a lot of people knew and loved Mike Simons in the state of West Virginia. I still get stopped and told stories i never knew about my dad or how he touched someones life.

Before he was a weatherman, he was a radio DJ and I still have a ton of his vinyl. He also acted in and directed community musical theatre and was the best in the area. In high school, he was a very good clarinetist and when it was my turn to be in the school band in 5th grade, I unknowingly signed up for a life of testosterone-fueled hazing and chose to play the clarinet just like my dad. I remember the night I first rented my plastic Bundy from Bandland and my "Best in Class Book One" vividly. My dad setup up two chairs and a music stand in the living room. First, he showed me the delicate way to put together a clarinet. ('You have to hold down this key up here so the bridge key doesnt get bent when you twist...'). After the assembly lesson, we went thru the first few notes in the book starting with 'open G' - me on my shiny plastic rental clarinet and my dad on his worn and dull wooden professional model clarinet. I showed up to school on the first day of band already ahead of my class. When I turned 15, I was first chair clarinet and got to sit next to the hottest girl in the school because she was second chair and my dad finally gave me his wooden clarinet - the Selmer 9-star with the wide barrel just like Benny Goodman, one of my dad's idols.

In another clarinet related story. I remember in 6th grade telling my Dad about the teasing I was getting for having picked clarinet as my instrument. Kids would snicker "Isn't that a GIRL'S instrument?" as if I a) felt the need to express by manhood at age 11 and b) somehow my choice of band instrument was that expression. So my Dad gave me a piece of advice. The next time anyone asked if clarinet was a "girl's instrument", since most famous clarinet players are male - Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw (I know, I was a dorky kid) - I should reply, "If clarinet's a 'GIRL's instrument' then name one famous GIRL clarinet player...". Sure enough a few weeks later, I'm boarding the afterschool bus armed with my pointed response. I couldn't wait to defend my manliness. The first kid to say something would be reduced to tears, not with fists, but with my crushing retort. In line for the bus there was one soccer kid, Todd, who had a spikey mullet and seemed to always wear shin guards even on non-game days. Todd looked at my plastic black clarinet case and asked THE question as if he were the first to ever pose it. I shot back quickly with "WELL... If clarinet's such a 'GIRL's instrument' then name one famous girl clarinet player..." and waited for him to run away crying. After thinking for a brief moment, Todd said, "Scott. I can't even name A famous clarinet player," and (probably) high-fived some other soccer player and laughed his way onto the bus. Thanks, Dad for the advice, but most father's don't instill the lineage of big band clarinet players into their 6th grade sons... but I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm glad you did... and I still hate shin guards.

In 8th grade, I was in the back seat on the way home from a vacation with my parents and my dad had recently re-purchased his two favorite albums on cassette - 'Revolver' and 'Sgt. Pepper's'. We listened a million times to both tapes that trip and when we got home he handed me the two cassettes and said 'Learn these.'. I did. I learned every song on my 47-key yamaha my parents just bought me. And that started my obsession with the Beatles and I began to sift through my dads Beatles vinyl, cassettes, magazines, pictures, videos, etc. He told me stories of when he saw them twice - once in Philly and once in Atlantic City while I watched the famous Shea Stadium concert on video being drowned out by shrill teenage screams. He told me about skipping school to buy the new Beatles record and he and his friends would sit and listen to it on repeat all day and night. And when the rest of the world thought that Beatles 'got weird', my dad thought they got even better.

I have so many memories of my father like those and they all seem to somehow revolve around music. I feel like he gave me a life long education preparing me for what i do now.

Another great memory of mine is being in elementary school and riding in the passenger seat of my dads car and listening to him sing an impromptu harmony with the song on the radio. It was a motown tune but I can't remember which one and I asked him 'How do I know what notes to sing for harmony?' and he answered, 'Just sing a third above or below the melody and that usually works. You'll have to change a few notes here and there to fit the key.'. That piece of information was way more valuable and simple than anything my college professors (that I'm STILL paying for) taught me.

Here are some quickies, I just couldn't leave out.

*When I was in high school, my dad let me write the 22 second WBOY news theme and even credited me at the end of the news cast. Any sample cassettes he received in the mail of national news and jingle packages he would hand off to me for me to listen and learn to what was out there so I could one day have the option of doing jingles. So while my friends were listening to 'Slippery When Wet' and 'License to Ill', I was probably in my room listening to 'Intense News Sequence 2'.

*My dad would work 9-5 everyday making commercials and imaging for the TV station or doing appearances then do a 530pm and a 6pm newscast. He'd come home for dinner with his stage makeup on and we'd have dinner and then hed go downstairs and take a nap... but he'd always somehow sleep blasting either La Boheme, his favorite opera, or Simon & Garfunkel Reunion Live in Central Park. Then hed wake up at 10:15pm and go back to the station for his 11pm newscast and be home again by midnight. He loved his work.

Even though I wrote a little growing up, my dad never heard most of my songs. He died before the Argument formed and before I graduated with my composition degree. He did hear a few less-than-stellar cover gigs and even booked my first gig for me at age 15, new year's eve at his friend's restaurant in Clarksburg. But because of him, not only was I prepared to make music my life but I chose to. My dad's passing away keeps me grounded. It reminds me why I do this through the ups and the downs with no promise, just the hope of success. My dad gave me so much knowledge and taught me how to be passionate about music and it'd be a shame to let that go to waste.

This blog is only a fraction of my memory of my dad. Somehow, I ended up with so much more than 20 years of memories, but these are the "music" ones. I could go on and on about his sense of humor and wit, his creativity, his passion for family, his love for film and tv but I'd fill the entire internet.

Losing my best friend, my idol, my father was the hardest thing I've ever been in my life. Its so personal but its also universal because everyone loses someone in their life and is left with a huge hole and only tiny memories to fill it. Thanks for reading a few of my tiny memories.

s